Note 14 to Chapter 8 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
For another example of Watteau's influence upon the English conversation piece, see M. J. H. Livesridge, "An Elusive Minor Master: J. F. Nollekens and the Conversation Piece," Apollo, 15 (1972), 34-41. On Watteau's continued popularity in England throughout the nineteenth century, see Haskell, Rediscoveries, pp. 51, 57. For a suggestion that George Eliot's description of Cheverel Manor influenced Henry James's description of Matcham in The Wings of the Dove, which also mentions Watteau, see Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 251.
Last modified 20 September 2000